Today e-mail is the most heavily used mode of business communication. According to various estimates more than 70% of the critical information being communicated resides in the body of the e-mail itself.
Social network analysis focuses on ties among, for example, people, groups of people, organizations, and countries. These ties combine to form networks. These ties matter, because they transmit behavior, attitudes, information, or goods. Organizations are fast recognizing the potential of organization social network analysis for enhancing innovation and productivity and better collaboration with teams inside as well as outside the organization (e.g., customers, vendors, research institutions, etc.). Roughly one-third of the presentations at the Academy of Management's annual meeting now have a social network perspective. However, enterprise social mapping has not yet become a mainstream decision making tool for managers.
Maps, or diagrams, which reflect social networks are called sociograms. Sociograms are a graphic representation of the social links for an individual or a collection of individuals. Analysis of a sociogram can lead to an understanding of the choices or preferences within a group. They can diagram the structure and patterns of group interactions. A sociogram can be drawn on the basis of many different criteria to diagram a group's interaction and patterns. These criteria include, but are not limited to social relations, channels of influence, lines of communication, etc.
The most challenging aspects of creating a sociogram remains collection of the data. Data collection conventionally depends on manual resources implementing complex methods, which can be extremely time and resource consuming.
There are several ways to collect data on social relations; however most of them depend on manual surveys or observations. Traditionally sociometrists focus on the structure of social choice within a group. They gather data by asking each member of a group to indicate his or her favorites (or opponents) with respect to an activity that is important to the group, or by showing each member a list of all the members of the group to choose from. These methods are called “free recall” and “roster” respectively. The respondents are generally asked to restrict their choices to two or three.
Other techniques involved “ranking” (rank all other group members with respect to their attractiveness), or “paired comparison” (choose all possible pairs of group members and choose a preferred person in each pair. However all the techniques that elicit data on social relationships through questioning are less accurate because these depend on the often inaccurate recollections of the respondents. To avoid this problem, there are other data collections techniques that register social relationships rather than elicit them. For example, the level of interaction among a group may be observed by a researcher. Although this is a more accurate approach, it is practically impossible to monitor a large group.
In Managing the 21st Century Organization, pages 1-8, International Association for Human Resources Information Management Journal, Volume XI, Number 4, 2007, by Valdis Krebs (available online at the Managing21CenturyOrganization website, last visited Jun. 13, 2008), a method is described where the client's I/T department gathered email data and provided a snapshot every month of a project. Information was gathered only from the e-mail's To: and From: fields. The Subject: line and the actual content within the body of the email were ignored. Further, data was only collected form emails addressed to individuals. Emails addressed to large distribution lists were not collected, nor made part of the snapshot. The sociogram produced from this data only drew a between two nodes if two persons sent email to each other at a weekly or greater frequency.
Research at MIT discloses implementation of social network fragments in two separate phases. See Social Network Fragments (available online at the Social Media Group website provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, last visited Jun. 13, 2008), and Faceted ID/Entity: Managing Representation in a Digital World, by Danah Boyd, Thesis Paper, Brown University 2001 (available online at the Social Media Group website provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, last visited Jun. 13, 2008). The first phase, considered the layout phase, was primarily the modification of the BuddyGraph work disclosed in Social Network Fragments. Modification was done so as to suit the needs of visualizing email networks in order to reveal the structural holes in the networks. The second phase, known as the visualization phase, focused on constructing an interactive visualization tool for users to explore the social data that emerged from their networks. The prior art does not consider the dynamically prioritized email communications according to a recipient's priorities and the actions on the prioritized emails by entities (email recipients and/or email senders), to establish and analyze social network maps.